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The Overskyscraper

high speciesTHE OVERSKYSCRAPERUBIQUITOUS TOWER COLLECTIVESSkyscraper cities, tower agglomerations and tower clusters, airport hub cities, waterfront developments, mixed-use developments, high-rise housing developments, high-rise condominiums, luxury residential developments, corporate office enclaves, hotel complexes and conference centers, commercial and financial centers, hyper-buildings, super-tall buildings, bundle towers, and twin towers: what is the underused, overused, abused, and misused potential of tower collectives?\'…that the destiny of humanity depends upon the attainment of its highest type.\'Friedrich Nietzsche, \'The Will to Power\'The skyscraper is the ultimate (the decisive and perhaps the last) building typology to absorb a systemic megalomania in a single cybernetic universe, a machine with its own laws that generates unpredictable organizations by extreme congestion and mutual intensification. The over-skyscraper is the primal (both primordial and elemental) building typology that provides substrate to the proliferation of systemic megalomanias in a plural cybernetic collective, hosting a multitude of organizations in a gradient of congestion and intensity.The skyscraper is pure exteriority paradoxically enveloped in a self-contained system, where the exponential discrepancy between the increase of interior volume and that of its containing envelope produce an unprecedented organizational potential*. The over-skyscraper is a multiplicity of various types of exteriority, a plural life form constituted of numerous systemic beings, whose assemblage and collaboration engender a manifold singularity, a monstrous commune. The skyscraper is a laboratory for new modes of collective life. It explodes the texture of normal life and offers an aggressive alternative urban reality that discredits all naturalistic urban realities*. The over-skyscraper is an abstract machine that breeds higher forms of architectural value with the escalating vitality of a collective of collectives. It intertwines multiple urban realities in a newborn ecology capable to withstand as a high life-form, a vigorous tardo-nature.The skyscraper hosts and promotes innovation without succumbing to self-consciousness. Its fertility resides in its capacity of absorbing urban conditions and unfolding them towards extreme scenarios*. The over-skyscraper relegates critical consciousness to the most rhetorical level of radical creative thinking, and overcomes the quest for innovation with the strength of its seemingly archaic and carefully constructed overwhelming presence, itself an extreme, persuasive scenario. The skyscraper is the medium for the thoughtless constitution of theories*: architectural theory without representation. The over-skyscraper is the medium for the constitution of meta-rational models of architectural ubiquity: architectural power beyond ideology. Restricted but plentiful, excessive but austere, stringent but magnanimous, abundant but severe, ascetic but excessive, voluptuous but disciplined, it is unbound of any dependence, reliance, or even care for reason, which it uses as the means for the propagation of its canon.\'The highest men live beyond the rulers, freed from all bonds; and in the rulers they have their instruments.\'Friedrich Nietzsche, \'The Will to Power\'If the existence itself of the skyscraper and the evolution of its architecture during the XX century assumes congestion to be a desirable condition to be swallowed and accelerated*, the concealed emergence of the over-skyscraper assumes the agglomeration of different forms of congestion as a default condition to be lavishly exploited through organizational complexity. It is the assemblage of multiple tower developments in a single multiplicitous organizational compound, volatile but sturdy. Not o